Afghan Water Polo Team Denied Visas To Train in Los Alamitos

Of all the obstacles they’ve faced, paperwork seemed like the least of their problems.

In their journey to become Afghanistan’s first Olympic Water Polo team, the Taliban killed three of the soldier-athletes in combat. The sheer logistics of forming a national water polo team in a war-torn, poverty stricken nation with only 13 pools could have stopped them before they got started.

But with the help of American soldiers who grew up playing the sport in Orange County, they formed a team and a dream of one day competing on the world stage.

However, where bombs and bullets couldn’t stop them, the United States visa application process did. This week the U.S. Consulate denied the squad’s visas for a three-month training period in California. They were scheduled to arrive in California on Christmas Day and begin training with American athletes in Los Alamitos and Newport Beach.

“The Afghan government had allowed the athletes to come to the U.S. and compete and train for three months,” said Bahram Hojreh, a Board Member of Afghan Water Polo and Executive Director of the Los Al Water Polo Club. “The U.S. government refused to give them visas for fear that they would escape and try to stay here. That was kind of a shock to us because we never saw it coming.”

Hojreh and supporters of the program had arranged their holiday schedule around the team, found host families for them and raised donations and sponsors for their training.

“It’s very frustrating,” added Hojreh. “The athletes were bummed."

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of State declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of the visa process.

According to state department policy, “Every alien shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer, at the time of application for admission, that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status.”

In other words, every applicant is presumed a would-be illegal immigrant unless he can prove enough close ties to his original country that there isn’t a risk he will stay in the United States after the visa expires.

Since the inception of Afghanistan's first water polo squad in 2008, three players have been killed in combat—and a fourth, who guarded the pool during practice, died after stepping on a landmine just off the pool's perimeter.

Yet team members remain determined to bring "swimming football," as the sport is colloquially known, to their war-ravaged nation.

The team is the brainchild of Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jeremy Piasecki, a native of Newport Beach.

When Piasecki held tryouts three years ago, none of the 26 men he chose had ever played the sport. Yet their goal was to make it to the 2016 Olympics.

“I don’t know if we will make the 2016 Olympics," he said after forming the team. "It would be a dream beyond anything I could ever imagine. But what we are really trying to do here is create heroes in Afghanistan. We want athletes to gain culture, experience and education and bring it back to their country. We want the country, its people and children, to have something to dream about, something to aspire to.”

Piaseck found an abandoned trash-filled swimming pool at a base east of Kabul. They cleaned it up, and the team began practicing and steadily improving. Hundreds of people attend the practices, said Piaseck.

The team’s supporters haven’t given up hope that they can come to the United States to train.

“There is a chance that next year we can bring them. If we can get them into another first-world country first, then they might be allowed to come here,” said Hojreh. “We are all military servicemen, and they teamed up with U.S. servicemen to fight the Taliban. This isn’t about politics. We’ll keep trying.”